On Borat

Foreign policy dominates the news agenda. As a seemingly endless dirge of blame and recriminations drags on with no end in sight, we are greeted to the hideous spectacle of pro-war MPs asking where it all went wrong, playing innocent and playing dumb. Where did it all go wrong? How did a civilised, democratic country help engineer such an awful and indefensible bloodbath? For a becalmed electorate, the answer lies at least in part in the dehumanisation of the non-white peoples that has been such a pervasive theme in popular entertainment ever since the very dawn of cinema, characterised by an abject lack of respect which in time helps render the most offensive outrages permissible by a strange numbing of the sense of human solidarity between peoples.

“Borat”, which opened at cinemas in the UK and the US this month, is the creation of Sacha Baron Cohen, an Oxbridge-educated comedian with a penchant for depicting (he might prefer satirising) delinquent young men. The sort of trenchant stupidity on show, which almost invariably makes for hilariously cringing viewing, is not of itself seriously identifiable with a particular racial group, yet it is perhaps a key to Cohen’s success that the common thread that connects his two most successful creations is that they both feature semi-literate, thoroughly ridiculous Asian men. So an otherwise mediocre standard of crass comedy is greeted with both critical acclaim and enormous popular success when the medium is the Asian male who is, it would seem, inherently funny.

Whilst it would be nonsense to suggest that any viewer who is amused by “Borat”’s antics, or those of his predecessor “Ali G”, is by definition some sort of racist, it is surely no coincidence that the only racial-ethnic profile which it is acceptable, in respectable society, to caricature and mock in this manner, is also the only racial-ethnic profile which can be bombed on the most dubious pretext and with the most glaring impunity.

If the purpose is satire, then it would be pertinent to ask what knowledge or experience Cohen has of the people he is satirising. However, although it might further be pertinent to question the motives of an elitist young Jewish man seemingly fixated with the inadequacies of Asian men, I do not consider his motives to be racist and until there is any strong evidence to the contrary he must be given the benefit of the doubt. Mr Cohen’s purpose is comedy, and he has clearly found a niche - the question mark is not over Cohen himself, but over his delighted audience.

We are reassured by some reviewers that the Americans are the real butt of the joke. Nevertheless, with the film a box office hit in the US, one wonders whether the intended message is as significant as the message that is perceived by the audience. The audience goes to laugh at this caricature of a stupid Arab - an audience who, on the whole, would identify such a caricature of a Jew or a Negro as tasteless and racist, or at the very least unfunny and passe. That such a market exists is a symptom of the cultural malaise of mainstream US and UK audiences, a malaise that translates itself into relative indifference when our elected governments kill tens of thousands of these brown people who, though human, are as we understand it now a little sillier than us, a little more infantile, a little inferior.

Editor's note: Mr Cohen has since defended his creation on the basis that it exposes the audience to their own prejudices - not their anti-Arab prejudices, he explains, but their anti-Jewish prejudices, by virtue of the fact that they find themselves laughing "with" the anti-Semitic Borat. See The Times newspaper for the full article. He cites as his inspiration the apathy of 1930s Germany towards the persecution of the Jews,which is a delightful unintended irony in light of the contemporary historical context in which "Borat" is released. No further comment required, methinks.